Networked Spirits and Smart Séances: Aura and the Anthropological Gaze in the Era of the Internet of Things

2015 has been declared the year of the “Internet of Things”, the promised (or threatened) era when our commodities communicate among themselves. But even the most optimistic prognostications cannot conceal deep ambivalences about objects and agency. How do we think about our things when they communicate and act independently of us? How do we frame our relationships with them? How do we articulate distributed intelligence? And how are others imbricated in those relationships? Yet, anthropologists have been asking these questions for some time, and, in this essay, I revisit some ghosts of anthropology's past in order to prompt spectral evocation of these anthropological futures. Through revisiting anthropological fascinations with the nineteenth-century séances, phantasmagoria, commodities and auras, this essay looks to nineteenth-century confusions not only to reflect on the confusions of the present, but also to gesture to possible futures where our lively things might help us challenge suspect dichotomies of human and non-human.     

“Lachkabinett” und “großes Fest” der Physiker. Walter Grotrians “physikalischer Einakter” zu Max Plancks 80. Geburtstag

“Funhouse” and “Big Celebration” of the Physicists. Walter Grotrian's ?Physical One‐Act Play”? for Max Planck's 80th Birthday. On the occasion of Max Planck's 80th birthday on April 23, 1938, a “big celebration of the physicists” (großes Fest der Physiker) was celebrated at the Harnack‐House in Berlin. The festivities were organized by the German Physical Society. Part of the ceremony was a “Physical One‐act‐play” (Physikalischer Einakter) written by the Potsdam astrophysicist Walter Grotrian. The actors of the humorous play were chief protagonists in the development of quantum theory such as Debye, Sommerfeld and Heisenberg. In this essay we analyze Grotrian's drama against the background of both the festive event and the professional and social setting of the physicists. We argue that below the level of comedy a number of characteristic and normally unexpressed aspects of the epistemic culture of the German physics by the end of the nineteen‐thirties is treated in the play.     

Book reviews—Comptes Rendus

Themes in medieval history—Aspects de l'histoire du moyen âge

Dianne WATT ed., Medieval Women in their Communities University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1997 ISBN 0–7083–1369–8(Hardback) £30.00 ISBN 0–7083–1361–2(paperback) £14.95.

Chris GIVEN‐WILSON ed., An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England, Manchester University Press, Manchester 1996 xi + 292 pp. ISBN 0–7190–4152‐X £35.00

Themes in Eighteenth‐Century History—Aspects de l'histoire du dix‐huitième siècle

Jeremy BLACK ed., An Illustrated History of Eighteenth‐Century Britain 1688–1793 Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996, xv + 244 pp. ISBN 0–7190–4267–4. £25.00.

Jeremy BLACK ed., Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997, viii + 199 pp. ISBN 0–7190–4947–4. £35.00.

Themes in Russian History—Aspects de l'histoire Russe

Lionel KOCHAN and John KEEP, The Making of Modern Russia: From Kiev Rus’ to the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Third Edn., Penguin, London, 1997, xii + 603 p., ISBN 0–14–015715–8. £9.99.

Wendy R. SALMOND, Arts and Crafts in Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870–1917, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, xv + 270p., ill., ISBN 0–521–41576–4 £50.00.

Morgan Philips PRICE, Dispatches from the Revolution: Russia 1916–1918, Pluto Press, London, 1997, xii + 181 p., ISBN 0–7453–1210–1 £30.00.

John Lewis GADDIS, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, x + 425p., ISBN 0–19–878070–2 £25.00.